Analyzing and refuting the inaccuracies lodged against the lgbt community by religious conservative organizations. Lies in the name of God are still lies.

Monday, July 22, 2013

NOM's Maggie Gallagher caught in a huge lie about 'ex-gay' therapy

Maggie Gallagher

One of the most annoying qualities of National Organization for Marriage former head Maggie Gallagher is how pathetically transparent she is when it comes to lying.

Last week is a perfect example. On July 15, she made the following statement in the National Review:

Chuck Limandri, my old friend from the Carrie Prejean, Prop 8 fights, is a heckuva a lawyer and one brave man. He’s taking on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s massive legal machine to defend the right of Jewish gay people to seek help:

“If
SPLC wins this landmark legal case, it will communicate to gays and
lesbians seeking to conform their sexual lives to Torah values that they
are second-class citizens, without the same right to seek help that
other gay people enjoy,” said Limandri.

SPLC is using
consumer-fraud laws to try to bankrupt these small nonprofits and if it
wins this case has announced plans to take it nationwide against 70
groups offering some form of sexual-orientation-change efforts. They
must not want publicity because this landmark case is flying under all
media radar screens.

Limandri is defending a Jewish ex-gay therapy group, JONAH from a lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center for consumer fraud. By her statement, Gallagher was giving support not only to JONAH but the practice of ex-gay or "reparative" therapy.

Doing this contradicts not only her but NOM's talking points that they are merely attempting to protect marriage.

So what did Gallagher do to cover up her inadvertent comment? She lied like a rug. In the July 18th edition of National Review, she said the following:

My last NRO post
on Chuck Limandri and the ConscienceDefense.org case he will argue
tomorrow in court in Jersey City has generated predictable headlines in
the gay/left press that I’m now backing “conversion therapy.” I don’t
back something called “conversion therapy.” I don’t even really know
what conversion therapy is, and I’m not qualified to express an opinion
on a particular kind of therapy.

I back the right of gay people to
seek the kind of counseling help they want, not the kind the SPLC
lawyers want them to have, including help to live their sexual lives
with integrity, according to their own values, not the SPLC’s values.
That’s all.

And there is the immature quality of lying in the face of insurmountable proof. According to Equality Matters:

Gallagher is lying. In 2001, she wrote an article for Townhall.com explicitly calling for more federal funding for research into "ex-gay" therapy, calling homosexuality "a sexual dysfunction":

Dr. Robert L. Spitzer is a brave man.

He was a brave man back in 1973 when, as a member of the American
Psychiatric Association's Task Force on Nomenclature, he met with gay
activists. As a result of his intervention, the APA, while rejecting the
argument that homosexuality is "a normal variant of human sexuality,"
agreed it "does not necessarily constitute a disorder."

He was an even braver man this week when he reported the
results of a new study of 200 "ex-gays": "(S)ome people can change from
gay to straight, and we ought to acknowledge that," as he told the
Associated Press.

Furthermore, in the first National Review post regarding the JONAH lawsuit, Gallagher bragged about being chairman of Limandri's group. Surely she must have known about the lawsuit beforehand.

Finally, how could Gallagher not know a thing about reparative therapy when her group, NOM issued support of JONAH in the lawsuit on its blog with language and tone almost similar to what Gallagher used in her National Review post:

On Friday my friend and hero Chuck LiMandri
(who was one of the first to help us get Prop 8 on the ballot!) will be
in court in New Jersey, taking on the goliath Southern Poverty Law
Center (SPLC) and its new militant attempt to misuse consumer fraud laws
to attack a small Jewish nonprofit named JONAH that helps observant
Jews with same-sex attraction live according to the Bible's laws.

This is one of the hugest stories you've never been told by the
media: the SPLC wants to use its $250 million budget and 7 full-time
staff lawyers to bankrupt therapists, counselors, and religious
nonprofits that offer help to people with unwanted same-sex attraction.
And they are misusing "consumer fraud" statutes to do it.

I suspect SPLC picked a Jewish service organization first because
they were hoping many of us in the Christian community would ignore it.
But whatever you think about sexual orientation, it's wrong to tell
people they can't ask for help to live their sexual lives as they
choose, not as the SPLC's lawyers want them to do.

It's Gallagher's incredible audacity to tell a blatant lie in the face of so much contradictory evidence which has led many to see NOM for the fraudulent organization that it is.

1 comment
:

I find it utterly amazing that they crow over a few hundred (maybe) "ex-gay" people -- all that required years of therapy and the expenditure of thousands of dollars, and some strong will and conscious decisions, and still mostly fail -- while they claim we're changed from our natural inner heterosexuality through vague means, without our input, and you can't pry it out of us -- and so, we're ex-hetero by the millions with nary a thought or dollar of therapy to anyone. How weak must heterosexuality be that we crazy people can just chuck it. You would think they'd wonder more how we do it, than how we can get out of it.

About Me

Alvin McEwen is 44-year-old African-American gay man who resides in Columbia, SC.
McEwen's blog, Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters, and writings have been mentioned by Americablog.com, Goodasyou.org, People for the American Way, PageOneQ.com, MSNBC, The Washington Post, Media Matters for America, Crooksandliars.com, Thinkprogress.org, Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, Newsweek, and Foxnews.com.
In addition, he is also a past contributor to Pam's House Blend,and a present contributor to Justice For All, Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, LGBTQ Nation, and Alternet.org.
He is the 2007 recipient of the Harriet Daniels Hancock Volunteer of the Year Award and the 2010 recipient of the Order of the Pink Palmetto from the SC Pride Movement as well as the 2009 recipient of the Audre Lorde/James Baldwin Civil Rights Activist Award from SC Black Pride. In addition, he is a two-time nominee of the Ed Madden Media Advocacy Award from SC Pride.